All eyes on online privacy

Technology

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 29, 2010

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Flat screen displays in stores employ facial recognition technology to tailor ads to a customer's gender, age and ethnicity. Smart phone applications can track a user's identity, location and even friends. The personal information posted on social networks may be accessible by employers - or law enforcement.

This brave new world demands a fundamental rethinking of the way that business, government and consumers deal with the huge amounts of data being generated and collected by emerging technologies, according to panelists at a roundtable sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday. The event at the UC Berkeley School of Law was the commission's second in a series of three public discussions exploring privacy in the digital age.

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"If we are to stay ahead of the technology curve, we must address the question of privacy by design sooner than later," said FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour during introductory remarks.

She took issue with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments that the "social norm" regarding privacy is changing as people become much more willing to share information online. Harbour said that surveys and behavior continually indicate that privacy is of utmost concern.

At the same time, most individuals aren't fully aware of how their data are being used or even when information is being collected, she said. The first panel opened with a discussion of the little-known topic of Flash cookies, a type of software deposited on computers to gather information. It runs through Adobe's Flash multimedia player and isn't deleted when a user clears the standard cookies through their Internet browser.

Many online and mobile businesses engage in what's known as behavioral advertising, choosing the ads to display based on the sites people visit, things they buy and search queries they enter. These companies have often defended the practice by stressing that the data is anonymous, based on an IP address, not a name.

Such information "doesn't solve the problem because of the nature in which it can be combined," said Scott Taylor, chief privacy officer at Hewlett-Packard Co. "We need to think about it in a new way."

The related issue of inadvertent sharing came up during the second panel, on social networking, with panelists citing several examples when a person's sexual orientation might have been determined by studying their list of friends or the groups they belong to.

Proposed solutions to these broad privacy challenges spanned a wide range. Many called on the FTC to create stricter regulations, including: requiring mobile companies to enforce privacy standards for application developers; mandating clear notification of the privacy implications of using a service, such as a universal symbol on sites that engage in behavioral marketing; and ordering companies to inform customers before installing software that monitors their online habits and making it simple to remove.

Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum, went a step further and advocated that companies delete user information within 24 hours.

Competitive factor

Several representatives of businesses on the panel argued that the market is addressing many of the problems, with privacy becoming a competitive factor like price or product quality.

"It takes a long time for users to trust an ecosystem," said Erika Rottenberg, general counsel at LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network. "If we breach that trust, our ecosystem would fall apart."

Tim Sparapani, director of public policy at Facebook, said the best option is to give users clear information and allow them to make their own privacy decisions.

"We shouldn't be in a position of making choices for users," he said. "We can't be in the position of trying to control people's attitudes."

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